


Little White Mysteries

by rosedamask



Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Marriage Proposal, Wedding Night
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-13 02:35:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29271096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosedamask/pseuds/rosedamask
Summary: “I’ve been thinking,” Audrey said, “about the ring.”
Relationships: Dale Cooper/Audrey Horne
Comments: 5
Kudos: 13
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 6





	Little White Mysteries

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scioscribe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/gifts).



“I’ve been thinking,” Audrey said, “about the ring.”

They were parked between the cherry trees out by the lake, and Cooper had left the headlamps on so the blossoms in front of the car would shine pink under the halogen as they swayed in the night. “The ring?” he asked, low under the sound of the leaves.

“Yeah,” said Audrey, her head on his shoulder, one hand on his chest. Out of the darkness overhead, a petal floated down onto the hood of the car, and Cooper felt a drifting caress along the collar of his shirt, as if Audrey had seen the petal and decided that was just how she wanted her touch to land too. “You know,” she said, “the one from that place you went.”

Before she left town for a Catholic school three states over, Annie Blackburn had put a green signet ring on the finger of a man with Cooper’s face. Now, on the other side of the woods, somewhere past the sycamore trees, there was a man on fire behind a curtain, and he was here with Audrey in his arms. “I remember,” he said.

“Guess it made me think about how they can keep you places,” she said, with another warm hitch of her fingertips. Cooper thought about the similarities between stone and stone: a hunk of jade, a pillar holding up a cave. Audrey turned her head to look at him, and Cooper saw how her pupils were blown wide to let in the night, like the eyes of a fox in the road. “Do you ever want to wear a ring again?” she asked.

He held up his hand. “I’m wearing one right now,” he said, hearing how his voice had gotten tight under his collar.

“That’s not what I meant.”

In the middle distance, another petal fell, white in the beam of the headlamps. There were hundreds of petals under the car, and Cooper would have knelt down in them for Audrey the first night they came here, if he’d had any right to make that kind of claim on her. “What did you mean, Audrey?” he said.

“I meant—like this,” she said, tracing out a circle over his fourth finger, turning his hand over so that his palm came to rest against hers. “Would you ever want to wear one like that, for me?”

He remembered how his ring came back to him at the Roadhouse, like the words that he had missed under the wail of music.

These, too, where the words that he had wanted so long to hear.

“Audrey,” he said, “name the day.”

In the end, she asked him to call in a favor from Judge Sternwood and find them a courthouse appointment for a day when her father was out of town. He picked out a diamond for her, small and pointed, full of clear fire, and she came to him in a plain black suit, as neat and familiar as the cut of an airline uniform or the clothing inventory in the file on the Black Dahlia.

He loved the strong, dark lines of her like nothing else, and she looked more brilliant to him than any other kind of bride he could have imagined, any column of white light behind a veil.

“For richer, for poorer,” he said to her, “in sickness and in health, in this world or any other, as long as we both shall live.”

She had a key for a room at the Great Northern, top floor, and Cooper whistled in appreciation as he let her down from his arms. Audrey tossed her bouquet over towards the wide sleigh bed, and a couple of petals came loose in the air.

“This used to be the honeymoon suite, until my father got the new one fixed up about a year ago,” she said, shrugging out of her jacket. “He wanted this one fixed up too, but that was going to be after he got done with the country club, so no one stays here now.”

Cooper looked around, and saw that the walls here were varnished a shade or two darker than the rest of the hotel, no decorations except for a few old nails that marked out where the picture frames must have been and a large wooden swan that had been left over the bed. “Sounds like you missed it,” he said.

“I wasn’t in here all that often, not really,” Audrey said, stepping back into his arms. “Sometimes I used to wait down the other end of the corridor, watch people as they went in. But I could never really figure out what it would be like to really be in here, you know?”

“They say marriage is a great mystery,” he said, and the shine in her eyes made him feel cool and fervent all at once, like he was stood at the front of a cave, torch in hand. “I can’t tell you how happy I am to be in it with you, Audrey.”

“God,” she said, slipping her arms up over his shoulders again, rubbing the point of her diamond against the back of his neck as he kissed her, deep and steady. “Um,” she said at last, arching back her neck, “could you close your eyes and wait here a minute? I have something else I wanted you to see.”

Cooper felt some lean, slow muscle at the side of his mouth pull into a smile. “I’ll turn and face the wall,” he said.

He heard the catch of wood as Audrey closed the door to the en suite, felt his own sweat catch on the edge of his wedding band. He had noticed, at the courthouse, that the hose she wore today were made from an ivory-colored nylon, so fine they looked like powder on her skin.

“Okay, you can look now,” he heard her say behind him, and he turned around towards her, saw the hot flush of her face, the dark thatch of hair that showed through the white lace of her underwear.

“Audrey,” he said, sounding ragged already, like he’d had his mouth on that lace: the panels of the bodice, the trim on her stockings or her open negligee. “Audrey, you look incredible.”

“Guess I always liked the idea of the trousseau more than the wedding dress,” she said, smiling a little. “Isn’t that crazy?”

“Not to me,” he said, coming in close, settling his hands on her waist.

“It’s like—if I was ever going to be a bride, I wanted to be a bride right over my skin, you know what I mean?”

“Like you are now,” he said.

“Like I am now,” she said, closing her eyes as he thumbed over a patch of warm lace, moving up carefully towards the brown skin of her aureole. “God—I love that feels. It’s like I could burn right through everything if you got me any hotter.”

“Feels to me like you already did,” said Cooper, low over her mouth, bringing her all the way to him with a kiss.

He laid her out on the bed, where the sheets were still covered with a handful of petals from her bouquet, some of them streaked in a green that reminded him of all that urgent life that had made them bloom out into something indolic, something that made his head swim. Spread out like she was now, the cut of Audrey’s panties was too thin to cover more than the split of her labia, and Cooper stroked at her pale outer folds, listening to cries she made, plush-sounding and breathy, climbing in pitch whenever he brushed over the lace.

Before too long, he would want to take those panties aside and slip into her in earnest, taste how she was clear fire all the way down when he put his mouth to her. But now her flush was deeper, showing him some warm truth he had waited for like he had waited for his old ring. “Audrey,” he said, and brushed over her mound with the knuckles of his left hand, letting the gold flash against the heat of her.


End file.
